This morning, as the inquest into the death of Princess Diana reopens, John Loughrey will have got up at 5am, painted the words Diana and Dodi across his cheeks and forehead in livid blue ink, and set off from Enfield in north London to make sure he is first in the queue for the public gallery at room 73 at the high court in the Strand - just as he has done on every other day the inquest has been running. The fact that he always arrives three hours early and there are always plenty of seats does not deter him.

"I don't want this to be handed me on a plate. I am doing it for Diana. I want to know the truth," he says. He has given up his job as a chef at a golf club to attend, collecting the paper passes that allow him into the court in the hope of one day selling his collection on eBay to raise money for Prince Harry's Well Child charity.

It is probably fair to say that Loughrey and the band of dishevelled elderly men and women who keep him company each day in the public seats have already made up their minds about the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed in the car crash in the Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31 1997. They are Diana devotees. As witnesses make unhelpful points, they draw in their breaths and even hiss, quietly. At adjournments, they discuss the finer points of the cross-examinations conducted by "Michael" - Michael Mansfield QC, counsel for Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of Harrods and Dodi's father, who has relentlessly, and so far largely fruitlessly, probed witnesses for a series of conspiracy theories on his client's behalf.

After sitting for 47 days since October 2, the jury of six women and five men has heard from 136 witnesses and the inquests, which resume today, are probably still not halfway through. The coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, moonlighting from his normal job as a high court judge and the fourth coroner to be appointed to preside over the case, is "broadly confident that we are still on track to finish within six months of the start, which will take us to April 2".

Fayed has repeatedly insisted that he wants the inquest to be conducted in front of a jury of members of the public, and fought a court case to ensure that it was. So far, however, there has been little towards proving his thesis that the couple were killed by Britain's security services at the behest of the Duke of Edinburgh, to prevent their marriage and to stop the princess giving birth to a Muslim baby.

There has been nothing to sustain Fayed's contention that the princess was pregnant. Her friends have testified that she could not have been, because she was having, or had just had, her period. Dodi's masseuse, the flamboyant American spiritual healer Myriah Daniels, who accompanied the couple during their last holiday on the Fayed family yacht, the Jonikal, in the Mediterranean, told the inquest that Diana was bleeding. Deborah Gribble, the boat's stewardess, testified via videolink from New Zealand, where she now lives, that she saw an opened contraceptive pill packet in the cabin. The princess's innermost, most intimate life has been ruthlessly laid bare.

There has been plenty of eyewitness evidence that paparazzi surrounded the crashed car immediately, but none has testified about the exact moment of the crash. The photographers may have behaved disgracefully but have not been shown to have caused the crash, or to have hindered the emergency services. They have declined to give evidence and cannot be made to do so.

Could Diana have been saved? Easy to be wise after the event when she had massive internal bleeding, wildly fluctuating blood pressure and heart attacks. Virtually no one survives such injuries. Was she going to marry Dodi? The evidence of friends and acquaintances is that, while the relationship was blossoming, the couple had known each other for only a month and Diana had told several of them separately that she had no intention of marrying again.

There has been conflicting testimony about how much Henri Paul, the chauffeur, had been drinking. A barman has testified that Paul was staggering, while others say he appeared sober. Daniels and Gribble, who had been on a car journey with him earlier in the day, testified that he drove recklessly.

One other assiduous attender has been the journalist Martyn Gregory, whose book Diana: The Last Days concluded that the crash was an accident. He said: "I wrote my book in 1999 and nothing that has come out so far has changed the basic facts."